The cuts are probably to show the insides of the bar so they know it's solid gold all the way through. Who knows if they're handing out fakes though, imo it's very likely.
My hash dealers do the same thing. Gotta see all the nuances and check quality through and through.
you can commonly find tungstein cored gold bars at sites like alibaba.com for far cheaper than real ones.
they are aparently pretty much indistinguishable from real bars without special equipment.
aparently even some major banks found some in their inventories
I'd love something like that as a paperweight or door stop. Or to sit next to my trillion dollar coin
Are they handing out fakes as well?
This is china we are talking about. Of course they are.
This means that real estate developers are saying "I can't sell this house for $250K but I can sell it for $300K and give you a 1Kg ingot worth $50K" to get around the overvaluing of the house, because people won't buy the house at the prices Chinese government insists they should be sold.
Governments are preventing companies from rapidly dropping house prices. But because they’re not worth what they’re forced to keep charging by the government (government isn’t forcing anyone to buy for example), developers are needing to add extra value to the sale to get buyers, hence the gold bars.
House is worth $300k, but the government is forcing you to list it for $500k, so if I throw in $200k worth of gold bars, the whole sale is worth the price.
Read past the first paragraph:
Part of the reason that property developers are struggling to shift stock is that several cities, in an effort to stabilise the market, have banned developers from cutting prices.
It's usual for the western social media to point out anecdotal occurings and then project it on entire country as normality.
